Putin Revives Gorbachev Glasnost Paper to Widen Election Appeal

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may be using an icon of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost
policy to widen his appeal as his support sinks less than a year
before presidential elections.

Moskovskiye Novosti, or Moscow News, which had as many as 6
million readers in its heyday, this week published its first
issue as a state-run enterprise in 21 years. The paper went
through several private owners before closing in 2008 and
returning for a nominal cost to RIA Novosti, the state-run news
service known as APN when it started the paper in 1980.

With Moskovskiye Novosti, the government wants to widen its
reach to more educated Russians as Putin, 58, his protégé
President Dmitry Medvedev, 45, and the prime minister’s United
Russia party prepare to retain control of parliament in December
and the Kremlin next March.

“This is yet another project mounted by the Kremlin, but
people are going to be skeptical,” said Masha Lipman, an
analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, by phone. “This will
make intellectual life more interesting but it doesn’t change
the situation of political and economic monopoly in the
country.”

Putin’s approval rating has fallen 14 percentage points
since mid-2009 to 57 percent, a five-year low, the Public
Opinion Foundation in Moscow said this month. The elections may
trigger a “political crisis” because voters increasingly see
their leadership as “illegitimate,” the Moscow-based Center
for Strategic Studies said in a March 28 report.

‘Dug In’

Gorbachev, the 80-year-old former Soviet leader whose
Glasnost policy relaxed censorship, has railed against
increasing control of national media and curtailment of
democratic freedoms since Putin was elected president in 2000.
The prime minister and his “St. Petersburg clan” of allies
have “dug in for decades of rule,” Gorbachev told journalists
in Moscow last month.

Vladimir Gurevich, the former deputy editor whom RIA brought
back to run the new version, said while the newspaper won’t be
an opposition voice, it won’t shy away from criticizing the
government. Gurevich said he’s been promised editorial freedom
and independence in hiring.

Moskoviye Novosti sells for 18 rubles (63 cents) at
newsstands. Its competitors include Kommersant, owned by Russian
billionaire Alisher Usmanov, and business daily Vedomosti,
published in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal and
Financial Times.

The front page of the March 28 inaugural edition included
stories about mass protests by fishermen and government plans to
promote a party that will agitate for civil liberties and a free
market economy. The newspaper is being distributed in Moscow and
eventually will reach other large cities, said Gurevich.

“We want to publish a newspaper for an intellectual
readership that cares about what is happening in the country,”
he said in an interview in his office in RIA’s headquarters in
central Moscow.

Moskovskiye Novosti’s relaunch appears linked to the plans
to create an alternative party to United Russia with a seat in
government that will represent the interests of urban elites,
according to Lipman.

‘Not Genuine’

“We may see more freedom of expression but this is not
genuine political participation,” she said.

Middle-class Russians, who account for 40 percent of voters
in Moscow and between 15 percent and 20 percent in other major
cities, have been ignored by authorities, said the Center for
Strategic Studies, which advises the government.

The report said Russia needed a coalition government after
December elections formed by at least two parties to include
critical voices. A new government-backed party, Right Cause, may
be headed by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Moskovskiye
Novosti reported.

Reporters Without Borders said the revival of the newspaper
may show that Putin’s ruling elite is more open to criticism.

“We are waiting with a lot of curiosity to see how it will
work out,” said Johann Bihr, head of the European and Central
Asia desk at the media freedom watchdog, by phone from Paris.
“It would be an excellent signal” if the newspaper is allowed
to act independently.

‘Not Free’

Russia, like other “authoritarian states of the former
Soviet Union,” controls national broadcast media, from which
most people obtain news and information, Freedom House said in a
report on March 23. All three of the national television
networks are controlled by the state.

The Washington-based democracy advocate last year ranked
Russia 175th among 196 countries in its annual press freedom
survey, labeling the country’s political system as “Not Free.”

Russia is also the eighth-most dangerous country in the
world for journalists, after countries including Iraq and
Afghanistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
which puts the number of murdered reporters since 2000 at 19.

The victims include Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for
Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper partly owned by Gorbachev.
Politkovskaya, who wrote about corruption and army abuses during
Putin’s presidency, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment
building in 2006, on Putin’s birthday. The killer or killers
have yet to be found.

“What we want to see tackled is the impunity for murders
of journalists and repeated assaults,” Bihr of Reporters
Without Borders said.